“Communities” Feature Now in WhatsApp

Back in April, WhatsApp developers announced the “Communities” feature. Finally, six months later, it became available to all users. It’s time to update the app to try it out.

How the “Communities” feature works is not difficult to understand. If you have a lot of group chats under your control, you can combine them by topic, interest, and area for faster and more convenient management. For example, you might have chats on various themes: work issues, communication with your condominium residents, or speaking with your students’ parents. Creating a community allows you to collect all the contacts you need in one place.

This feature makes it easier to manage groups and notify members. You can broadcast a message to a community comprising several groups, rather than individually choosing chats to communicate with. So you can be sure that everyone interested in the announcement will receive it. Besides, information chats are automatically generated within communities where only administrators can leave messages.

At the time of the launch of this feature, users could add up to 50 groups to one community, while one group could be included in several communities. The total number of participants in the information chat can be, at most, 5000. A new community icon has been placed near the chats tab on Android (top control panel) and in the bottom menu on iOS. Although other messengers (like Telegram) have been offering this functionality for a long time, it’s nice to finally have it in WhatsApp. At the moment, it is only available in some countries, but the developers are gradually adding new regions, so stay tuned.

Should you have upgraded WhatsApp and tried out the latest functionality, we invite you to post your feedback in the comment section! Does it make group management easier? Is it well implemented?